Circular knitting machines of the kind which produce a knitted tube of fabric are a well-developed art, and have been used for many years to process textile filament. Such machines have several basic components which act upon the filament and the knitted fabric as they move through the machine: Filament in-feed equipment, the knitting head, the fabric take-down system (which provides the desired knitting tension, a key knitting control parameter), and the fabric take-up system. All of these are power operated and operate at nominally correlated speeds. In practice, however, the correlation of such speeds has heretofore not been particularly precise, nor has the imprecision in correlation been very critical, since most textile fibers, and the resulting knitted fabrics, are resilient or elastic enough to compensate for it. However, the knitting of metallic wire mesh presents a more difficult problem. In such knitting, a relatively high knitting tension is required to form the wire into the desired stitch shapes. This compounds the difficulty presented by the relative lack of stretchability of wire, which makes it prone to breakage if snags develop during knitting, or if the speeds of the components get too far out of correlation, either abruptly or gradually.